There Is No Partiality With God, Part 1

John Piper

John Piper is founder and teacher of desiringGod.org and chancellor of Bethlehem College & Seminary. For 33 years, he served as pastor of Bethlehem Baptist Church, Minneapolis, Minnesota. He is author of more than 50 books, including Reading the Bible Supernaturally.

For there is no partiality with God. 12 For all who
have sinned without the Law will also perish without the Law, and
all who have sinned under the Law will be judged by the Law; 13 for
it is not the hearers of the Law who are just before God, but the
doers of the Law will be justified. 14 For when Gentiles who do not
have the Law do instinctively the things of the Law, these, not
having the Law, are a law to themselves, 15 in that they show the
work of the Law written in their hearts, their conscience bearing
witness and their thoughts alternately accusing or else defending
them, 16 on the day when, according to my gospel, God will judge
the secrets of men through Christ Jesus.

I think it will be good for us here at the end of the year to
see one great truth about God and one great truth about man, and
how these two truths will make a difference in 1999 if you see them
and embrace them for what they are. I don't bring these two truths
to this text, but have them thrust on me by this text. So let's go
to the text and try to follow Paul's line of thought in Romans
2:11-16.

Getting Inside the Mind of an Inspired Writer

And I say "line of thought" because it is surely that. It moves
not in a circle, but in a line from one premise to the next to
establish his main point. Only as you reflect on this argument and
how he builds it do you see the two truths - one about God and one
about man. So let's try to follow Paul's thinking. Let's think his
thoughts after him.

This is a thrilling thing to do: to be able to think the very
thoughts of an inspired Biblical writer. Some of you have
discovered how exciting it can be to think the thoughts of a great
writer, say, Augustine or Anselm or Aquinas or Calvin or Luther or
Descartes or Pascal or Locke or Kant or Milton or Shakespeare - to
sense that you have actually entered his thought world and seen
what he saw and made it your own through the amazing act of
understanding. But all of you can experience something even more
thrilling, and that is to enter the thought world not just of a
great writer, but of a divinely inspired writer, who is not writing
out of mere natural genius, but out of supernatural revelation. To
get inside that kind of head and follow those thoughts and see that
reality is a thrill unparalleled in the reading of all literature
and the watching of all TV and all videos and all movies. And I
covet it for all of you.

So come with me. Review for just a moment what Paul is doing
here in Romans 2. In verses 1-5 he pointed out that the people in
his day with high moral standards, especially many his own kinsmen,
the Jews, were guilty of hypocrisy. They point the finger at the
immoral Gentiles mentioned in chapter one, but in doing so, Paul
says, indict themselves, because they do the same kind of
things.

Then he explains in verses 6-10 that the judgment on Jew and
Gentile is going to be "according to their deeds," not according to
their ethnic or religious advantages. Jews and Gentiles will
receive or not receive eternal life on the same basis. Do their
deeds corroborate their faith?

There is No Partiality with God

Now in verse 11 Paul states the principle or the truth about God
underlying this train of argument: "For there is no partiality with
God." This is why God will judge the Jews and the Gentiles not
according to their appearance or their circumstances or their
cultural or religious advantages, but according to something more
intrinsic. This is something fundamental about God. This is
impartiality. This is one of the two big truths I want you to get
this morning. So we need to dwell on it. In fact, the rest of this
text dwells on it and ties it in to a second big truth about
man.

This is such a major truth about God that the New Testament
seems to invent a word for it - several words. Before the New
Testament there are no instances of the word used here for
"partiality" or "respecter of persons." The idea was there in the
Old Testament: God does not "receive face," they would say, that
is, he is "impartial" - he is not moved by irrelevant external
appearances. He sees through them and goes to the heart of the
matter and is not partial to appearance and circumstance. Nobody
breaks the rules and gets away with it, no matter how powerful or
clever or wealthy or networked. All are judged by the same
measure.

In the New Testament this was so important to make clear that
the writers took these two words, "receive face" and combined them
into a new verb in James 2:9 - "be-a-face-receiver" (prospolempteo)
- and two new nouns - "a-face-receiver" (prosopolemptes, Acts
10:34) and "face-receiving" (prosopolempsia, Romans 2:11; Ephesians
6:9; Colossians 3:25, James 2:1). There is no "face-receiving" with
God, Paul says.

How Can God Be Impartial When Only the Jews Received the
Law?

But there is a problem here - an objection that has to be
answered. So Paul takes another step in his argument. Here's the
objection: You say, Paul, God is going to judge all people
according to their deeds, and therefore impartially, but, in fact,
God gave the Law of Moses only to the Jews, and so they have access
to what deeds are required of them, and the rest of the world
doesn't. So how can you say that God is impartial to judge
according to deeds when he has only told one group of people what
the deeds are that they should do?

Here's the first part of his answer from verse 12: God is
impartial "because all who have sinned without the Law [that is,
nations who don't have the Old Testament Law of Moses] will also
perish without the Law, and all who have sinned under the Law [Jews
who have the Law of Moses] will be judged by the Law." You can see
that this is a direct response to an objection: They don't have
equal access to what they will be held accountable for!

This is an objection that comes up often in defending
Christianity from it critics: what about people who don't have the
same access to the Bible that you have? What's Paul's answer? He
says, You are right: different groups of people have different
advantages when it comes to the amount of truth God has revealed.
But then he says, the judgment of God will not be partial to those
who had access to more truth, it will be according to the truth
they do have. So he says, verse 12: "All who have sinned without
the Law will also perish without the Law, and all who have sinned
under the Law will be judged by the Law." The Law of Moses will not
be brought in to condemn those who sinned with no access to the Law
of Moses. It will be used only to judge those who had access to
it.

Not Having the Law Is Not the Basis of Judgment

When someone perishes who never heard of the Law of Moses, it is
not because they never heard that Law. Not hearing the Law of Moses
will not condemn anyone. And hearing it will not save anyone.
That's what Paul says in verse 13, "For it is not the hearers of
the Law who are just before God, but the doers of the Law will be
justified." In other words, having access to the moral Law of Moses
and hearing it and knowing it is not an advantage at the final
judgment. At the judgment, the question will not be: How much of
the Law did you possess and hear and know? The question will be: In
view of how little or how much you possessed, how did you live? How
did you respond in your heart and your action to the Law you did
know?

We will come back in a few weeks to the phrase in verse 13, "the
doers of the Law will be justified," to explain how that fits with
justification by faith. In the meantime, notice three things: 1)
doing the Law might include trusting God's grace for salvation, if
the Law commands that we trust him that way; 2) it doesn't say that
justification is based on the doing of the Law, but only that the
doers will be justified; whether the "doing" or something else is
the basis of justification is not said; 3) notice that the
justification is future - "the doers of the Law will be justified."
This is probably a reference to the final judgment, just as in
verses 7-10. So for now, I suggest you understand "the doers of the
Law will be justified," to teach the same thing as verse 7 -eternal
life will be given to those who persevere in good deeds.

But don't miss the main point in the argument here: Not having
the Law or having it is not the basis for judgment in the last day:
doing it is.

How Can You Do the Law if You Haven't Read it?

But that immediately raises another problem that Paul now has to
answer. Somebody is going to say: How can anyone do what the law
requires if they don't have a copy of the Law to read and follow?
Paul, you say that doing and not hearing is what counts, but still
those who have the Law are at an advantage, because they know what
they have to do.

Verses 14-15 are Paul's answer. "For when Gentiles who do not
have the Law do instinctively [literally, by nature] the things of
the Law, these, not having the Law, are a law to themselves, in
that they show the work of the Law written in their hearts, their
conscience bearing witness and their thoughts alternately accusing
or else defending them."

So Paul's answer to the question: How can God be impartial in
judging according to our deeds if the Jews have the law and the
Gentiles don't?, is that the Gentiles do have the law. The moral
law of God is written on their hearts, verse 15 says. Or, as verse
14 says, "They are a law to themselves."
Then he says in verse 15b
that the evidence for this is that the moral behavior of all kinds
of people all over the world shows that they have a sense of many
true moral obligations, and their consciences confirm this with the
conflicting self-defenses and self-accusations that it constantly
brings up.

Now let's get the whole train of thought before us, from verse
11 on. First Paul says that "there is not partiality with God"
(verse 11). Then he defends this in verse 12 by saying that God's
judgment will fall according to how we respond to the measure of
truth that we have access to. Then he explains (verse 13) that mere
hearing of the law is no advantage to the Jew at the judgment day,
and not hearing it is no disadvantage to the Gentile, because doing
and not hearing is the issue. Then he explains (verses 14-15) that
the law really is available to those who have no copy of the Law of
Moses, because God has written it on the heart and given all of us
a conscience to awaken us to this moral knowledge in our
hearts.

All Have the Moral Law of God on Their Hearts

Now here is the second great truth I want you to see this
morning - the truth about man. All human beings have the moral law
of God stamped on their hearts. Paul is teaching something
enormously important here about human nature. Notice the wording of
verse 14: "When Gentiles who do not have the Law do instinctively
the things of the Law, these, not having the Law, are a law to
themselves." The "instinctively" is literally "by nature." In other
words, Paul is telling us something fundamental here about human
nature. This is what it means to be human - to have the law of God
pressed or stamped or written on our heart.

We have seen this teaching before in 1:32 ("They know the
ordinance of God, that those who practice such things are worthy of
death") and 1:26 ("Women exchanged the natural function for that
which is against nature") and 1:21 ("They knew God"). And the point
of it all is to stress that every human being is guilty before God
because everyone suppresses (1:18) the truth and none lives up to
even the demands of his own conscience, let alone all the demands
of God known to him. Nevertheless, all are accountable to God and
will be without excuse at the judgment day. All Jews and all
Gentiles are accountable to God and guilty before him under the
power of sin.

Now we are in a position to see clearly the two great truths
that I mentioned at the beginning: one about God and one about
man.

The Truth about God is that he is not partial. And what God's
impartiality means is that he judges not on the assumption that we
all have access to the same amount of truth, but that we all have
the truth we need to be held accountable, and that we will be
judged by our response to what we do have, not what we don't have.
God is so committed to this dimension of his justice that he
secures it by creating every human soul with the imprint of his
moral law and with the capacity to know his glory revealed in
nature. He is impartial not merely with what he finds in the world;
rather he sees to it that what he finds in the world conforms to
his impartiality.

So the second great truth (about man) is built on the first one
(about God), namely, all human beings have the moral law of God
stamped on their heart. Every human soul, as it comes to
consciousness, knows that it is created by God, and dependent on
God, and should honor and thank God (1:20-21), and should do the
things that are written on the heart (2:14-15), and that failing to
do them is worthy of death (1:32).

Impact of These Two Great Truths

Now these are great truths to know and will have an impact in
your life if you will embrace them for what they really are. Here
are three examples of the kind of difference it could make in your
life - if you know yourself this way and your children this way and
others this way.

1. An Implication of Knowing Yourself this Way

Consider one implication of knowing yourself this way. If God is
impartial and judges by fixed standards that he has revealed, and
if you, in the depths of your human nature as the image of God,
have the moral law of God stamped on your being, then to know this
and embrace this will give a tremendous gravity and solidity and
stability to your convictions about God and about truth and right
and wrong. Because you will see clearly that there are fixed truths
and fixed moral standards that you do not make up. They are not
mere human opinion, but come from God, outside of us. Life is not a
cafeteria of equal options from which you can choose. Life comes
with profound givens. God exists. God is impartial. God is and
knows the truth. God has imprinted it on human hearts. It is
knowable. We will be judged by it. Therefore life is not trivial.
And our convictions about God and morality gain gravity and
solidity and stability.

2. An Implication of Knowing Your Children this Way

Consider one implication of knowing your children this way. Look
upon your children as beings whose souls God himself created in his
own image and inscribed with the law of God. Look upon them as
beings who are endowed, like no other creature, with the capacity
to know God and, in fact, will know God -enough to perish by or
live by. Ponder, as you look at your child, that here is a person
who has been prepared specially to live according to goodness and
truth. Here is a being not to be taken for granted, or trifled
with, or neglected - a being whose main purpose in the universe has
been set by God: that he or she know God and do God's will. To know
your children in this way will make you more serious about your
parenting and the glorious privilege and responsibility of joining
God's inner work to bring these children up into Christ and make
God known and loved.

3. Implications of Knowing Others this Way

Finally, consider two implications of knowing others this way.
Everyone you know at work or school or in the neighborhood has the
law of God written on his or her heart. Everyone you know, knows
the impartial God. Whether they suppress this knowledge or not,
they have it. They know their Creator at a profound level, and they
know their duty at a profound level. God has dealt with them deeply
before you ever came on the scene. God has gone before you in
preparing them for himself and his will.

So here's the first implication: therefore, be hopeful in 1999
as you do evangelism, not minimizing the blinding effects of sin,
but also not despairing that there is no point of connection in the
person you care about. There are points of connection, deeper than
you ever dreamed. Speak the truth in love and God may be pleased to
make the connection between what they know by nature, and what you
tell them from the Word of God.

And the last implication is this: beware of despising anyone.
Every time you disapprove of someone - a politician, a colleague, a
church member or leader, a person of another culture or race -
remember that God has written his law on that person's heart and
given him or her the knowledge of himself. This is to be marveled
and wondered at, not despised. Human nature in the image of God,
fallen and depraved as it is, should nevertheless spread the aroma
of sanctity and reverence over all our repugnance or disagreement.
There is an honor that belongs to man as man in the image of God,
who wrote his law on all our hearts.